Going vertical, Artemis I boosters in place at Kennedy Space Center; awaiting core stage delivery

Richard Tribou, Orlando Sentinel
·2 min read

The puzzle pieces keep slogging toward a rocket ready to launch on the Artemis I mission to the moon as early as November as the two solid rocket boosters for the Space Launch System this month were stacked at the Kennedy Space Center.

The two boosters developed by Northrop Grumman will deliver the majority of the thrust on liftoff for the massive SLS rocket. They await the arrival, though, of the 212-foot-tall core stage and its four RS-25 engines converted from the space shuttle program.

NASA recently performed a successful hot fire test of the core stage at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, and could soon be shipped by barge to Kennedy. Although the core stage’s prime contractor Boeing is working with NASA to sign off on the hot fire test results and refurbish the hardware, NASA is in charge of the transport via its Pegasus barge once it leaves the test stand to make the six-day voyage through the Gulf of Mexico around the tip of Florida to KSC. That date has not been announced.

Once it arrives, the core stage will be mated with the boosters and eventually the Orion space capsule ahead of NASA’s planned mission to the moon. Together they can produce about 8.8 million pounds of thrust, which would make it the most powerful rocket ever to launch from Earth.

NASA completed stacking the boosters, each made up of five segments and a nose assembly on March 2 after teams with NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems used a massive crane to install them over several weeks onto the mobile launcher inside Kennedy’s Vehicle Assembly Building. Each booster is 177 feet tall and capable of producing 3.6 million pounds of thrust.

Artemis I will be an uncrewed mission to the moon, but actually traveling farther from Earth than any ship ever built for humans has ever flown before, about 280,000 miles away.

NASA’s SLS schedule still has Artemis I launching as early as November with Artemis II, a crewed mission around the moon without landing, by 2023 and then a 2024 flight that aims to put the first woman on the moon. Those targets, though, were part of the Trump administration’s push and could change under the new Biden administration.